By David Filipov
Moscow — Russian President Vladimir Putin (click here) on Thursday accused the United States of trying to interfere with Russia’s presidential campaign in retaliation for what the Kremlin dismisses as unfounded U.S. allegations that Moscow interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential vote.
One the eve of a possible meeting with President Trump at an economic forum in Vietnam, Putin suggested that the United States is pressing for the disqualification of Russian athletes at the 2018 Winter Olympics as a way of creating discontent with his tenure as president.
The International Olympic Committee this month disqualified two Russian cross-country skiers. With fewer than 100 days before the beginning of the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, the IOC has still not made a decision about whether to let the country that hosted the 2014 Games participate....
Try interrogating Markus Hess. I think he is a double agent.
February 16, 1990
Celle, West Germany — Three West Germans (click here) were convicted Thursday of selling the Soviet Union information they got by sneaking into Western military databases using a home computer and a telephone.
In West Germany's first computer hacker trial, ex-croupier Peter Carl, 35, and two computer wizards were given suspended jail terms of up to two years.
Markus Hess, 28, and Dirk Brzezinski, 30, were said to have broken--or hacked--into military and industrial computer networks in the United States, Europe and the Far East to obtain information they sold to the Soviet KGB secret police for $54,000.
Carl, the main contact man, made numerous trips to East Berlin and handed over floppy disks full of data to a KGB agent code-named Sergei, who operated from the Soviet trade mission.
The three defendants, who faced a maximum sentence of five years, smiled at each other as presiding Judge Leopold Spiller read the verdict at the district court in Celle near Hanover.
Explaining the decision to give sentences much lighter than the prosecution had demanded, Spiller said: "No serious damage to West Germany has arisen."Then again, there is "The Cuckoo's Egg (click here). All the good ole boys, Vladimir. Only, they really aren't that old, right?
Cliff Stoll was an astronomer turned systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab when a 75-cent accounting error alerted him to the presence of an unauthorized user on his system. The hacker's code name was "Hunter" -- a mysterious invader who managed to break into U.S. computer systems and steal sensitive military and security information. Stoll began a one-man hunt of his own: spying on the spy. It was a dangerous game of deception, broken codes, satellites, and missile bases -- a one-man sting operation that finally gained the attention of the CIA...and ultimately trapped an international spy ring fueled by cash, cocaine, and the KGB.
